CHICAGO (Court TV) — The roughly 160 inmates on Illinois' death row may gain some slight comfort from a startling statistic: for every person executed in Illinois since the 1970s, another has been exonerated.

On Monday, 49-year-old Ronald Jones became the 12th former death row inmate to be cleared of the charges for which he was condemned to death.

Jones spent eight years on death row for a 1985 rape and murder, before DNA evidence raised questions of his guilt in 1997.

He has maintained that the police beat him to force him to confess. Prosecutors spent two years studying whether to retry him before finally dropping the charges.

Jones remains in Cook County Jail while Tennessee tries to extradite him for escaping from a work-release program almost twenty years ago.

Across the country, 79 former death row inmates have been found innocent since the 1970s.

Though less than 5 percent of the roughly 3,500 people on death row are in Illinois, the state has provided 15 percent of those 79 exonerations.

Only Florida, with 18, accounts for more, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center. Florida has 390 people on death row and has executed 43 people.

For twenty years, from 1973 to 1993, charges were dropped against an average of 2.5 death row inmates per year.

But since the 1980s, as DNA testing has become more sophisticated and as the population on death row has shot up, that figure has almost doubled to 4.6 per year.

Ten of the exonerated Illinois inmates have been found innocent in just the last five years, thanks to DNA testing and student investigations led by Northwestern University journalism professor David Protess.

"That's an amazing figure, really," said the Death Penalty Information Center's director, Richard Dieter. "I think Illinois has been the most dramatic, the most clustered, in recent years."

According to a Chicago Tribune analysis in January, Illinois has one of the worst records for prosecutorial misconduct in the country.

Of the 381 homicide convictions thrown out nationwide because prosecutors gave false evidence or withheld evidence, 46 were tried in Illinois — more than any other state except New York.

In February, Protess' students cleared Anthony Porter, who spent 17 years on death row for a 1982 double murder before the students and a private investigator, obtained videotaped confessions from another man, who has since turned himself in.

The following month, Chicago's Cook County agreed to give $36 million to the four black men falsely charged with a brutal gang rape and murder in 1978.

This week, five law enforcement veterans in DuPage County, near Chicago, are launching their defense in a trial charging them with conspiring to frame Rolando Cruz for the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl. Cruz spent more than decade on death row before he was finally acquitted in 1995.

"You have really got to stop and look at what's going wrong," said Dieter.

These high-profile cases, however, may indicate not just what is wrong in Illinois, but what is right. Dieter said the police and prosecutors may not necessarily be worse in Illinois, but that defendants' resources are greater.

Unlike in many Southern states, Illinois death row inmates can attract the attention of Chicago's left-leaning legal community, where non-profit law centers, anti-death penalty advocates, and law and journalism professors may take up their case.

Illinois also has fewer cases to call on this community's efforts. The state now has about 160 death row inmates, compared to more than 500 in California and more than 400 in Texas.

"With that kind of scrutiny, I think we'd see a lot more reversals in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas," Dieter said.

That scrutiny, however, has fostered increasing skepticism of the death penalty issue itself in Illinois, both by the government and the public.

In March, the Illinois House approved a non-binding resolution urging a six-month halt to executions while a panel studies the state's capital punishment statutes.

Gov. George Ryan has set up a committee to review death penalty cases, and the Illinois Supreme Court has also put together a committee to review the death penalty.

And a public opinion poll in March, by the Chicago Tribune, showed that support for the death penalty in Illinois has dropped 13 percent in the last five years, the same span of time in which ten death row inmates have been found innocent.

— Catherine Heins

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